Bitcoin miners' grid access is becoming a scarce asset for AI companies, but converting old mining sites into data centers is far more difficult than imagined. Behind this is a structural pressure overlooked in the crypto market: AI capital siphoning is spreading from the funding side to the physical infrastructure side.

The event itself is simple: the surge in AI electricity demand, coupled with miners holding a large number of grid-connected sites, theoretically allows them to transition to providing computing power for AI. But analysts point out that mining sites' power contracts, cooling systems, and network architectures are mostly designed for ASICs; converting to GPU clusters requires rewiring, upgrading transformers, adding liquid cooling, and the cost is close to building new.

More importantly, this exposes the awkward position of the crypto industry in the capital competition. In the first half of the year, AI chip company Etched raised $800 million, Amazon AWS set up a $1 billion AI team, while the main fundraising in the crypto market during the same period was in prediction markets and payments. The flow of funds determines the priority of infrastructure transformation—AI companies prefer to build new data centers rather than retrofit mining sites.

Miners face a dilemma: continuing to mine faces profit compression after the halving, while transitioning to AI lacks both technology and capital. This structural contradiction may accelerate miners' selling of Bitcoin to maintain operations; Riot Platforms recently transferred 500 BTC to a custodian, which could be a signal.

The downside risk is that if miners' large-scale transformation fails, a drop in hashrate could affect Bitcoin network security; meanwhile, AI's insatiable appetite for electricity will not stop, and the crypto market may remain at a long-term disadvantage in the competition for hardware resources.

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